This Is Tron

What's the big deal? The year was 1982, you simply didn't see anything like these effects in movies at that time. Tron was the first theatrically released film to incorporate fully rendered computer generated images as backdrops, vehicles and characters. The biggest special effects anyone had seen by that point were in the Star Wars movies, so when Tron was released people had a hard time wrapping their brains around the concept of the film.

Today the general audience will look at these outdated special effects and scoff, citing "AVATAR" as having such amazing computer generated imagery that it is difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what is an effect. But when I look back at the effects in Tron I see something with more character and meaning, something that was hand-crafted and the work put into the film meant more than just the click of a mouse button on an editing program.

Animated Sequence Using A Script

I wrote the following bash script that will take the video provided and change all the green in the video and make it red.

#!/bin/bash


# extract images from 00006.mts file

echo "Extracting Images"

ffmpeg -i 00006.mts -f image2 %d.ppm


# replace green from all images to red

echo "Replacing Green"

FILES=*.ppm
b=1

for a in $FILES
do

ppmchange -closeness=42 green red $b.ppm >$b-red.ppm
let b=$b+1
done

#convert manipulated images into a video

echo "Creating Video"

ffmpeg -f image2 -i %d-red.ppm GreenNowRed.avi

so this:



becomes this:

Bash Tutorial

Beginning my Bash ventures, I started with the following Tutorials.




The first video was just to re-familiarize myself with the lessons we've been going over in class. The second video was to get myself acquainted with using other commands in a bash shell.

Using the information from these tutorials I created an executable script that would go to http://apod.nasa.gov/apod and download the image posted from each day in 2010 and sort them into a file for each month.

Unfortunately the terminal in MAC has a different way to format dates so my script did not run correctly. I am currently working on learning to change the format of the date so my script is able to run using the http://apod.nasa.gov/apod format for their image storage.